Make it Meta | Beam me up, Blade Knight!

Hello and Welcome back to the second installment of Make it Meta. Today we're going to be looking back on this weeks Off the Meta star, Blade Knight, and seeing what sort of team we can make that can put him to best use. We're not looking to make a Worlds level team, but to have fun making a team that you could bring to your local scene and expect to do reasonably well. With that in mind, let's get underway!

As I explained earlier this week, Blade Knight does one thing with a lot of utility: attack alone. No matter which iteration you choose, you're going to be sending him at your opponent alone for maximum efficiency. As such, the first question we have to ask is which one is going to do the most for us. Each of the three iterations brings one effect to the table when attacking alone:

Spin an opposing character to level 1

Overcrush

Limit your opponent to one blocker of equal or lower level than Blade Knight

After a bit of thought, a clear winner emerges from the trio, the rare Blade Knight which limits blockers. The common Blade Knight is effectively an expensive and limited version of Black Widow - Killer Instinct (one of my favorite characters) and the uncommon, while cheap, will quickly lose effectiveness as your opponent walls up with half-decent characters, especially since he must attack alone to be effective. With the rare Blade Knight, overcrush is a very feasible win-condition since your opponent can only use a single blocker and there's a few useful synergies to be had with other off meta cards...

When your team focuses on 1 or 2 attackers to carry the day, you become extremely vulnerable to certain globals and effects. In order to stop this, you have a few useful options such as the Human Paladin, Doomcaliber Knight, or Lord of D. Ring. With the strategy I have in mind involving the use of action dice to modify Blade Knight's attacks, we'll be best served by Lord of D. Ring, since if my opponent brings it as well, it can entirely screw up my plans. Finally, since we're going to be making such use of action dice, we're going to bring an Elf Wizard to help me get them at the right times and to purchase them in the first place.

Core

Now we need to find a win condition. Blade Knight enables a variety of strategies involving attacking, but we're looking for something unexpected to dazzle and amaze your opponent while they die. To give use all that and more, we're going to include an incredibly tricky combo that I guarantee your opponent will not have expected: Obelisk the Tormentor and Teleport. That's right, Teleport. For those of you still looking at me with a confused look in your eye, Teleport works similarly to Polymorph in that it allows you to swap one of your fielded character with a character from your used pile. How does this help? Well, it allows us to teleport in our Obelisk the Tormentor in the attack phase when our opponent blocks our Blade Knight with a measly one blocker. That's going to give us 7+ points of damage immediately and he's almost guaranteed to survive for another swing next turn as well. Now, both of these cards are fairly expensive, so we need ramp. Since we're so invested into 's and we already have heavy protection from Lord of D. Ring, Kobolds are the perfect choice and will make sure we have the right energy for our purposes.

Support

With three slots left and most of the holes in our team filled in, we're left with deciding on a basic action and two character choices. For our basic action, we can choose to pick between some sort of overcrush card like Anger Issues which would almost guarantee our Obelisk to be an OTK, or Cone of Cold to use our common energy to pump Obelisk's damage by two per energy. Because we're reliant on one action already, it would be best to take Cone of Cold to boost our consistency and mean we don't have to rely on rolling multiple action dice for our strategy to work.

I would normally include some sort of blocker, but my opponent doesn't have access to overcrush strategies because I'm shutting them down with Lord of D. Ring. Also, my ramp and protection is already taken care of, meaning I have two slots to deal with removal and boost consistency even further. To that end, we're going to throw in Beholder in order to hold onto our Teleport for the perfect moment and Prismatic Spray to clear away any problematic effects on my opponents team. Alternatively I could include beast instead of Prismatic Spray for some added incidental ramp and the ability to use my opponent's possible PXG a bit more, but it's likely to stay on its card for the majority of the game.

Full Build

This team has a lot going for it and will be a formidable force in casual competition. It showcases the best of the best when it comes to the Yu-Gi-Oh/D&D sets and exactly how Teleport can be used effectively. It also gives you a fair deal of options for substitutes if you'd like to customize it and change the specifics. Anger Issues is a valid replacement for Cone of Cold in order to boost your win condition. Prismatic Spray can be taken out for Lex Luthor in order reuse and recycle your action dice if you don't pull them at the right time. It's also adaptable in that you have a variety of options with your buy order. If you're unafraid of your opponents globals/action dice, you can skip over Lord of D. Ring. If you're really brazen, you can skip Blade Knight and go straight for Obelisk and field him by himself. You can even Grab Anger issues and use that with only Blade Knight for some powerful early damage that your opponent is going to struggle to mitigate.

When making this team, I was really shocked that I was never tempted to use a Marvel character. Marvel usually has the best of the best when it comes to a lot of characters and abilities, but the team just worked better with Yu-Gi-Oh and D&D. In the prototype I had actually used Wolverine - The Best There Is, but I found it was too situational. Moving to Obelisk made sure that I wasn't useless if I couldn't roll action dice and he can serve double duty as a massive wall. It's also becoming apparent that AvX had some really fun and intricate action dice. They're very diverse and have the ability to be used in entirely unexpected ways.

I'm really enjoying making these eccentric teams and I hope you all enjoy hearing about them. If you have any questions or suggestions, I'm always excited to engage with the audience. Thanks for reading everyone and I look forward to next week!